Letter from Indo-Portugal – irreducible India

When Vasco da Gama’s three battered little ships dropped anchor off Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of over ten months, they had finally found the sea route between Europe and India so long sought by Portugal’s kings and explorers. Apart from the desire for knowledge, Da Gama’s tatterdemalion miniarmada had come for two reasons – one mystical, one practical – summed up in the famous exchange between resident Moors (who had long been trading here) and Lusitanians: “What the Devil? What brought you hither?” “We came in search of Christians and spices.”

The Christians da Gama found were not the Prester John types the Portuguese had envisioned but Nestorians who had never even heard of the pope. Da Gama chose to overlook this awkward fact. He also long believed that the local Hindus were Christians, too, albeit with unorthodox practices and curiously multi-limbed idols.

The main reason for Da Gama’s, voyage was more prosaic. The Portuguese had long wanted to be able to obtain Indian spices without having to go through Arab and Venetian intermediaries. Not only did they want to save money, but they hoped to remove this highly profitable trade from the hands of Arab merchants and so weaken their erstwhile cruel occupier. (The Moors had been expelled from Portugal in 1253.)

Da Gama’s gifts to the zamorin, the Hindu ruler of Calicut – which included striped cloth, nuts, and honey – were hopelessly inadequate. This caused the zamorin to doubt Portugal’s importance and hearken to the intrigues of the Moorish merchants, who wanted their new rivals expelled. The situation was not helped by da Gama’s temperament. (Indignado is an adjective often used by Portuguese historians to describe him.)

Portugal’s machinations were assisted by other factors. They were not the only ones anxious to rein in Muslim military aggression and economic might. As well as fighting among themselves, Muslim armies were engaged in constant wars against their infidel neighbours while, as Cornell historian H. Morse Stephens noted in his 1897 biography Albuquerque:

The concentration of all commerce in the hands of the believers in the Prophet was not favourably regarded by the wisest of the Hindu rulers, who were therefore inclined to heartily welcome any competitors for their trade.

Almost as soon as da Gama had returned to Portugal with his report, King Dom Manuel started to organize a much larger expedition under Capt.-Maj. Pedro Alvares Cabral, and this set sail from Belém on March 9, 1500, with the blessing of the Pope, who had by now conferred upon the kings of Portugal the optimistic title of “Lord of Navigation, Conquests and Trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India”.

The expedition was blown off course in the Atlantic and eventually found itself off a strange shore, to which Cabral laid claim on behalf of Portugal and gave the name Vera Cruz (today’s Brazil). Tristan da Cunha, Angola, and Mozambique were other by-products of the Indian explorations, and Portugal’s Indian bases at Goa, Diu, Daman, Bassein, and Bombay would eventually be used as springboards to colonize Ceylon, the Malaccas, and Macao. Like other empires before and since, Portugal’s grew like Topsy.

More gales off the Cape of Good Hope sank four ships, with their complements, including Bartholomew Dias – who, appropriately, had originally named the cape Cabo Tormentoso, or “Cape of Storms”. Eventually, six ships arrived at Calicut. Cabral ingratiated himself with the new zamorin – the old one had died – with carefully chosen gifts and was granted permission to found a Portuguese trading post. But finding that the Moorish merchants were preventing the Portuguese from obtaining worthwhile cargo, he seized a Moorish vessel. In retribution, the Moors attacked the trading post, killing the factor and 53 of his men. A furious Cabral destroyed ten large Moorish ships in the harbour and then bombarded the city of Calicut for two days.

The rajah of Cochin, 100 miles southward, was hostile to Calicut and so welcomed the Portuguese navigators. Cochin became the site of the first permanent European settlement in India, with a major trading post, staffed by seven Portuguese. Today, it is still one of Asia’s busiest ports, with great ships passing up and down the strait between the fort and Vypeen Island, through the mats of water hyacinth, beyond the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets that are one of the characteristic sights of what is now called Kochi.

Fishing net at Kochi

Upon Cabral’s return to Lisbon in July 1501, he gave a highly partisan account of his travails, and the king accordingly developed a desire to “punish” Calicut. He prepared a powerful armada and chose da Gama as admiral. After various en route excesses, including the burning and sinking of a Moorish ship filled with unarmed pilgrims, da Cama bombarded Calicut and removed the ears and hands of some traders unlucky enough to be entering the port at the time (after which they were tied to the masts of their ships, which were set alight and pointed toward the shore). An armada sent by the zamorin was defeated easily, and da Gama returned to Lisbon in October 1503 with a hugely valuable cargo. (Da Gama was to make a third, final voyage to India in 1524, and he died on Christmas Eve that year at Cochin, where his stone may still be seen in St. Francis’s church – although his body was returned to Portugal in 1538.) It had become clear that the Portuguese would need to establish permanent military base on the Malabar Coast if they wanted to protect their mercantile interests. The place chosen by the leader of the 1510 expedition, Affonso de Albuquerque, a highly experienced soldier and sailor, was Goa.

Goa had been an important seaport since the third century B.C. and had been fought over by Hindus and Muslims since 1312. Eventually, it fell into the hands of the rajah of Bijapur, Yusuf Adil Shah, the lucky and talented son of a sultan of the Ottoman Turks. (Saved by his mother from being put to death upon the accession of Muhammad Il, he was educated secretly in Persia and rose from slave to army officer, governor, and king.) Under his rule, Goa became prosperous, but he taxed non-Muslims punitively, and his Turkish garrisons were notorious for their cruelty to nonbelievers. More mystically, an influential sadhu had prophesied that “a foreign people coming from a distant land” would conquer Goa. Augmenting this prophecy was the persistent appeal to the Indians of fairness of complexion, which gave the Portuguese automatic high-caste status (a preoccupation that is still very strong today).

Goa was ripe for regime change, and, when Albuquerque’s troops took the city on March 3, 1510, locals supposedly showered him with “flowers made of gold and silver”. But two months later, the Portuguese had to abandon Goa, as Adil Shah advanced to recapture the town. Because of the weather, they could not leave the harbour, so they remained at anchor in the mouth for almost three hungry and difficult months – during which time Adil Shah offered to provision the ships, saying that he wanted to beat the Portuguese in battle rather than by starvation, which offer Albuquerque spurned in a manner fully as indignado as da Gama, receiving the emissary on his flagship, to which the flotilla’s entire food supply had been brought as a bluff.

By November, Albuquerque was back, supported by 28 ships and both European and local troops. The ensuing battle gave rise to many anecdotes, such as Albuquerque’s comments to one of his lieutenants, who had carried on killing mounted enemies despite having an arrow sticking out of his face and blood all over his armour:

Sir Manoel de Lacerda, I declare to you that I am greatly envious of you, and so would Alexander the Great have been, had he been here, for you look more gallant for an evening’s rendezvous than the Emperor Aurelian.

Upon conquering the city for the second time, Albuquerque ordered that any Portuguese who had gone over to the Muslims should have their ears, noses, right hands, and the thumbs of their left hands removed and their hair plucked out. He also ordered the massacre of all the Muslim inhabitants, as the clemency he had extended after the first invasion had not been repaid with loyalty. Interfaith dialogue was never one of Albuquerque’s strong points. When first visiting Cochin, he had been shocked to find Jewish merchants in residence and had asked permission of the king to “exterminate them one by one”. (He did not succeed; there are still about twelve Jews living in Cochin, with a poignantly atmospheric 16th century synagogue, sole survivors of one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the world.) Yet he could be pragmatic and was adroit at exploiting divisions between foes. foes. With him as viceroy, Goa’s relations with its neighbours were marked by skill and ruthlessness. For example, Albuquerque suggested to one disaffected prince that he should facilitate his accession by means of poison. While on an expedition to the Persian Gulf, he ordered the immediate assassination of a hostile advisor to the king of Hormuz in front of that startled monarch, who subsequently became satisfactorily compliant.

He also fortified Goa and took steps to concentrate the whole trade of the coast in the harbor, to the extent that it soon became a hugely wealthy city, nicknamed “Golden Goa” and “Pearl of the Orient”. He founded a mint, reformed local government, and allowed native customs to continue as before, with the exception of suttee (not banned in British India until 1829). He also encouraged Portuguese of inferior rank to intermarry with the locals so as to bind the populations together. In his 1851 Goa and the Blue Mountains (a sparkling companion for long Indian train journeys), Sir Richard Burton blamed the eventual disappearance of Portuguese India squarely on this last policy – “a most treacherous and delusive political day dream”.

The Portuguese introduced the Goans to potatoes, peppers, and garlic. (The word vindaloo is from the Portuguese for “garlic wine”. ) Most notably, they began to build Southern European-style churches, convents, seminaries, gateways, forts, barracks, mercantile buildings, and houses, which today give parts of Goa and Cochin a distinctly Mediterranean architectural appearance, with wrought-iron balconies overlooking narrow streets, flaking pastel facades, bowing pantiled roofs, and verandas slowly collapsing under the combined onslaught of sun, rain, and insect. Goa’s massive churches, with their high, cool, empty interiors, could easily be in Lisbon or Oporto, except that the ornate baroque styling has been given an exuberant twist by local artisans, with local motifs and an occasional sinuousness of carving more reminiscent of Buddhist or Hindu sculpture than of Western – for instance, Mary nursing the Holy Infant in the branches of a golden palm tree, a host of badly painted, brown-eyed angels erupting out of gilt ectoplasm on a reredos. Many of the religious carvings are very crude –

…of the most grotesque description . . . saints, whose very aspect makes one shudder and think of Frankenstein

thought Burton – yet they are executed with great verve.

After Albuquerque’s death in 1515, Goa gradually became an important religious centre, with St. Francis Xavier using it as a base for missionary work in the Far East. (His body is in the Basilica of Bom Jesus at Goa and is the object of a major decennial pilgrimage.) Later, it became a notorious stronghold of the Inquisition, with regular autos-da-fé; the imposing, if clumsily carved, table used by the Inquisitors is on display in the Goa State Museum.

Old Goa, and the estuary of the Mandovi

Standing in front of the fungus-spotted Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount, I had an achingly beautiful view down over the Mandovi River and the luxuriant jungle, with the white churches of Old Goa shining incongruously above the coconut palms as the sun was setting. In the foreground, a sea eagle flapped lazily in the superheated updrafts, while I cooled down after the climb and looked out over the remains of Indo-Portugal.

Apart from the confectionery-white upper stories of Se Cathedral, the churches of St. Cajetan and St. Francis and the shard-tower of St. Augustine’s, the only signs of human activity were a small ship heading out to sea in the far distance and occasional plumes of smoke, rising straight up in the heat-blued stillness. For about twenty minutes, I had a simulacrum of Golden Goa all to myself, as Albuquerque must have seen it – a safe, handsome harbour, a military stronghold, a fertile place where a gleaming city might be built and lived in and loved, a Camp of the Saints on the heathen shore. Here, where I stood, Adil Shah had placed his unavailing artillery in 1510. Now, his successors’ landmark chapel was itself sliding into graceful dissolution.

Goa started to go into decline after the Portuguese and Spanish crowns were united in 1580. Spain’s Dutch and British enemies now saw Portugal’s Indian territories as legitimate targets and started to expand commercial and military operations in South Asia. But more fundamental was the dysgenic depletion of Portugal, with thousands of the best and bravest products of the tiny kingdom being sent out year after year to perish in shipwrecks and battles or of disease, with the survivors encouraged to settle in India and marry Indian women. It was now the turn of the Dutch and English to exchange national health for imperial wealth. In 1661, Bombay was part of the marriage dowry of Catherine of Braganza, wherein lies yet another epic of ambition followed by hubris.

Goa’s few remaining grand Portuguese houses are very nearly not there at all. The floor of the blue ballroom of the famous Pereira-Braganza house undulates gently; a termite-infested piano is quietly collapsing in on itself in one corner; you can hear birds through holes in the silk-lined ceiling; and, in the rippling old glass of the white framed Flemish mirrors, the chairs given by a Portuguese monarch to a Braganza progenitor look like they are in some long-lost submarine kingdom.

The best things in Goa’s Architectural Museum are the outsize bronze statues of Portugal’s national poet Luiz de Camoes (his epic Lusiads were translated by Richard Burton) and Albuquerque, removed from public display in Panjim after Nehru finally sent his troops across the scarcely defended frontier in 1961, and a collection of paintings of Goan viceroys and governors.

The poor execution of many of these paintings (most were painted by Indian artists) is curiously appropriate, as it emphasises Goa’s isolation and unhealthiness, a province of a provincial empire. Many of the inhabitants of these alternately sickly, stern, and refined faces – the owners of ancient Estremaduran names, the lords of mountainside estates and old vines, wearing black cloaks and blue uniforms festooned with sashes and the crosses of the Order of Christ, the Order of St. James of the Sword, and the Military Order of St. Benedict of Aviz must have disliked being sent to India.

Portuguese arch at Goa

They would have been given the keys to the city at the Viceroy’s Arch, before passing in under the statue of da Gama into a hive of frenetic activity, where there are now just overgrown fields, crumbling walls, drifts of litter, and a few aristocratic, white churches on empty lawns. Many of these dignitaries now lie beneath the granite slabs decorated with their family crests in the broken nave of St. Augustine’s at the top of the hill, the stylised stone castles, wolves, eagles, trees, and mailed fists evoking the faraway homes they would never see again. How curious it must be to be a scion of one of these families, visiting from the old country, and see your family’s crest baking beneath the sun. Richard Burton again:

It is always a melancholy spectacle, the last resting-place of a fellow countryman in some remote nook of a foreign land, far from the dust of his forefathers . . . the wanderer’s heart yearns at the sight. How soon may not such fate be his own?

Such bittersweet reflections are impossible to avoid when among ruins, especially the ruins of an empire created by people a little like oneself.

On our last day, wilting after an early flight from Cochin, we took a slow, packed suburban train far out into Mumbai’s northern shanty suburbs. Alighting at the busy Vasai Road station, we found an obliging auto-rickshaw driver and lurched and hooted through squalor for twenty minutes in search of Bassein Fort.

Ceded by the sultan of Gujarat to the Portuguese in 1534, Bassein became the site of a powerful Portuguese fortification and, soon, the administrative centre, “Court of the North”, for all of Portuguese India. It was sacked in 1739, and its garrison extirpated. After bombardment by the British in 1780, it was never rebuilt. Now, mud-caked water buffalo loll in what were once refectories, spiders with six-inch leg-spans stretch their snares between palms in what were once the aisles of churches, and banyans force their twisting roots through the old masonry. Trees have sprouted, lived, and died on the top of what were once strong bastions and give a furry, indeterminate shape to once-imposing walls. Here and there on the dark walls, or hidden under surging ivy, one can still see European memorial slabs, carved window tracery, baroque curlicues, and scrollwork bordering gigantic archways leading into nothingness, crouching stone animals and Latin inscriptions above double doorways into roofless edifices.

This picturesque desolation makes for a fascinating contrast with the bustling and indescribably filthy fishing village nearby, with its daubed Madonnas, cobalt and jasmine walls, fly-encrusted Bombay duck drying in the sun, piles of fish guts lying on the ground, and young people rushing past on motorcycles, staring at our European faces as, probably, their ancestors stared at other European faces long ago. In India, it feels irresistible to draw parallels between the fate of Bassein and the possible fates of today’s “Courts of the North” – the European nations that have exhausted themselves in search of chimeræ and are now imploding. The Portuguese – and Dutch, French and British – came, saw, and conquered India, and now are being overwhelmed in turn. The old Occidental urge to explore, and imprint on others’ landscapes has moved very close to home. Goa, Bassein and a hundred other Indian places show us there is always more than one possible end to history.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2006 edition of Chronicles